Present day telecommunications and information networks have become larger and far more complex than those which have been available only a few years ago. The trend towards increases in size and complexity can be expected to continue at a high rate into the foreseeable future with the proliferation of cellular networks, the development and deployment of global satellite networks, and the expansion of basic wireline networks in developing nations. Both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks are now being connected together b y means of the Internet and other internetwork connection mechanisms.
In order to maintain network reliability and an acceptable quality of service, it is necessary to carefully monitor and manage network resources. However, as existing networks grow larger and more complex, network management also becomes more difficult and more complex. The prior art responded by providing automated management tools for reporting network status. These tools allowed network management personnel to improve the quality of service and maintain high network availability and reliability.
Such automated management tools were distributed and generally arranged as client server applications which provided integrated for supporting heterogeneous network environments. The client portion of the tools was arranged to have a standard interface which minimized variations of look and feel of the system as seen by the network operations personnel whereas the server portion was designed to operate on different platforms. The distributed architecture allowed the tool to evolve and scale as the networks evolved in size, capabilities, and geographies.
One such distributed network management tool is the Solstice Enterprise Manager.TM. (Solstice EM) network management system which was developed and is marketed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. This tool has an object-oriented and distributed architecture which consists of a plurality of cooperating components, including applications, libraries, information services, databases, and protocols, each of which performs specific tasks. The managed resources are arranged as a plurality of interconnected nodes and "management agents" running in each node gather information about the resources associated with the node. The information is then forwarded back to a management information server (MIS) which interacts with management applications running in other nodes. The MIS can request and change management parameter values, perform requested actions, and receive and evaluate problem reports (e.g. events, such as SNMP traps and CMIP notifications) that the management agents generate.
Although the MIS and the management agents can communicate with each other via various network management protocols such as SNMP, CMIP, or other proprietary/legacy protocols, the Solstice EM.TM. framework interposes software model representations of managed resources in the MIS between management applications and agents of managed resources. The result is that the management applications need not be concerned with management protocol dependencies of the managed resources since the applications only interact with the software model representations in the MIS.
In particular, the management applications direct management tasks in the MIS via a "Portable Management Interface (PMI)" which is a high-level abstraction of an interface for manipulating objects, regardless of their class description, supported protocol, or location. The PMI is also used by the MIS to communicate with the management agents. For example, the MIS can use a management protocol adapter (MPA) to communicate with a management agent. An MPA translates MIS requests to protocol-specific primitives (e.g. CMIP, SNMP, RPC, or other proprietary/legacy protocol primitives) depending upon the management agent in question. For example, a CMIP MPA communicates with CMIP agents.
While distributed client server network management systems operate well, they have some drawbacks. For example, the client portion of such systems was generally platform dependent. Therefore different client versions were necessary to allow the management operations to be performed from different locations. Further, much of the information, such as events, were forwarded back to the client application and cached in the client application for later review. Therefore, the computer system running the client application had to have significant memory and computing power. Consequently, it was often not possible for network personnel to monitor or manage a network from a convenient location, such as their home.